Clandestine Cake Club...

Back at the end of last year I heard about the Chichester Clandestine Cake Club via Twitter and went along to their November meeting. Somehow nine months has gone by and despite the best of intentions I never made it back to a second meeting... until last night!

The group meet at a location in Chichester (not disclosed till the day before) and share cake creations on a set theme. Last time the theme was winter warmers and I took a ginger cake. This time the theme was a bit trickier, we were asked to provide a cake which was a supersize version of a picnic food. After lots of fruitless Pinterest browsing I decided I was going to have to make something up from scratch and so the Scotch Egg cake was born!

As luck would have it, an old (and very creative) friend came to see us for lunch yesterday and together we managed to make something half decent...

Should you ever want to make a Scotch Egg cake this is how we did it...

In addition to your usual cake ingredients, you will need rich tea biscuits, Betty Crocker cream cheese icing and yellow and red food colouring

(1) We made two chocolate cake mixtures (my cake mix is here, just leave out the Philadelphia) and cooked each one in a well greased six inch pyrex glass bowl.

(2) After they had cooled, we hollowed out a hole in the middle for the egg part. For the egg white, we made a third sponge cake mixture (basically my chocolate mixture with vanilla rather than cocoa) crumbled that and mixed it with Betty Crocker cream cheese icing. We then packed the walls of the hollow out with the cake mixture.

(3) Next we put the cakes in the freezer for about 15 minutes to harden them up and coated the outside with the Betty Crocker icing and crumbled rich tea biscuits. The most effective way to do this is either to put the biscuits in a slightly larger bowl than the one you used as a mould. Or to turn the cake upside down (narrowest part upwards) and pour the biscuits over it.

(4) Next we added the yolk which was Betty Crocker icing coloured with yellow colouring (the whole tube!) and a bit of red.

(5) Finally having decided the egg "white" was not white enough, we topped it with icing powder, in retrospect it would have been far more sensible (and neater) to mix the icing sugar with a little boiled water to create a paste... maybe next time!

PS - Thank you to all the lovely folks at Chichester Clandestine Cake Club and especially to Helen & Laura who organised the event and to Jan who took the top photo!